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Composer Edino Krieger, born in 1928 in Brusque in the state of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil, has been a benevolent presence and important influence on music and culture in Rio de Janeiro for many years, where he is beloved and respected by musicians in all parts of the sometimes fractious classical music scene. A number of discs with his work should be available to American listeners, including the Concerto for Two Guitars recorded by Sérgio and Odair Assad on the GHA label, as well as the survey of his works on the Soarmec label, which includes the Suite for Strings, Divertimento for Strings, the Ludus Symphonicus, Estro Armonico and Canticum Naturale. We talked at his residence in Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, in August 2002.

MOORE: What was the musical environment like in your family when you were young?

KRIEGER: I was born into a family of musicians. My grandfather, whose parents were German, played viola. My Italian great-grandfather played wind instruments. My father was the oldest of the children in his family. He started making music early - at eight years old he was already playing bandoneon, he played in the cinema. Later he learned to play violin, clarinet, saxophone, guitar. He was the musical leader in the family. He taught his brothers various instruments, and his cousins as well, on the Italian side of the family. In 1929, when I was one year old, they organized the first jazz band in Santa Catarina, where I was born, which was called the Jazz Band America. They were all members of the same family – five Kriegers (my father and his brothers), and five Diegolis, from the Italian side. Besides the jazz band, they also did the carnavals in the whole region, in my city, and in neighboring cities – Tijuca, Florianópolis. They did all the Carnaval balls, the parades, they rehearsed groups that were going to participate, chose their costumes and so on. The carnival rehearsals took place in the tailor shop of my grandfather, who was a tailor by trade, as were my father and all his brothers. So during Carnaval they turned the huge room of the tailor shop into a place to rehearse. Everybody went there, they chose the song for Carnaval so they could make the costumes – a gardener, Pierrot, toreadors from Madrid. The costumes were made to fit in with the music in those days. I grew up in this environment. My father also organized the choir for the Evangelical Church (my family on the German side were Lutherans), and so I heard the jazz band, music for Carnaval, and religious music. He was also director of the band, and so I also heard a lot of the repertoire for band – dobrados, marches, that sort of thing. And what’s more, my father and his brothers put together groups to do serestas (serenades), which they played on the weekends, at night, under the windows of people’s girlfriends, a repertoire which was very typically Brazilian, which was just getting started in this period, in the twenties and thirties, which was when you had Pixinguinha, Ernesto Nazareth, when this type of music was taking shape. I also heard the whole repertoire of waltzes, maxixes, choros, schottisches, which was the origin of urban Brazilian music. That was my spontaneous musical training, even before starting to study music.

MOORE: What was the music like in Santa Catarina? Was there influence from Italian music? What part of Italy were your Italian relatives from?

KRIEGER: My Italian great-grandfather was from Southern Italy. My grandmother (my father’s mother) was born in Italy, but farther north, in Bologna. My father’s grandparents were from the north of Germany, from a little city near Hamburg. But what is interesting is that from my city, Brusque (40 km from Blumenau, which is better-known)...

MOORE: For its German culture...

KRIEGER: Even today Blumenau is very connected to its origins. The Oktoberfest is very well-known. It corresponds to the Brazilian Carnaval, since there is almost no Carnaval in Blumenau. In my city, certainly because of the influence of the activities which had been started by my father, there came to be a different sort of tradition, much more involved with the Brazilian cultural and musical traditions, like Carnaval, choro, serestas. Even the municipal band there had a different repertoire from the one in Blumenau, which until today has a more Germanic repertoire. But Brusque was more in tune with what was being done in Rio de Janeiro, in São Paulo, and which got there, in the days before radio, because my father would acquire scores and parts from the publishers in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo so he could keep up with what was being done there. I think this is interesting from the cultural point of view, because in spite of being a city with a very central European tradition, with many immigrants from Italy and Germany – my own family used to sing Italian and German music – it didn’t just stop there, just cultivating its origins. It went through a kind of metamorphosis, a symbiosis, that is, with the music that was being made in other regions in Brazil.

MOORE: You began by studying music in Brusque. At what point did you arrive in Rio de Janeiro?

KRIEGER: I began by studying violin with my father. He wanted me to be a virtuoso of the violin, a Jascha Heifetz -- it was his greatest dream. He was a rather good violinist himself. I started at seven, and by the age of 12 or 13 I was doing concerts throughout the various cities in the state. The governor of the state was present at one of these concerts, in Florianópolis, the capital, when I was fourteen. After the concert the governor came to the dressing room to give me his compliments, and to ask if I wouldn’t like to continue studying the violin in Rio de Janeiro. Of course I said yes, and the next day he gave me a scholarship from the state government so that I could study violin at the Conservatório Brasileiro de Música in Rio de Janeiro.So I came here in 1943, when I was fifteen, and began to study violin. And at the Conservatory I met Koellreutter, a German professor, who was very young at the time, twenty-something years old, and who was developing his work, beginning to have a formal group of students. I was interested, took a test, he accepted me as a student, and I began to study composition. Little by little I lost interest in the violin. My father was very sad about that, but he got used to it... instead of having a Jascha Heifetz he would have a...

MOORE: Mozart....

KRIEGER: A composer. I wouldn’t end up being either a Mozart or a Villa-Lobos... but...So then in 1948 I was studying with Koellreutter when I got a scholarship for the Berkshire Music Center in Massachusetts, at Tanglewood. I did a six-week course with Aaron Copland, and after the course, through Copland, I got a scholarship to Juilliard in New York. I spent the whole year there in 1948-1949, studying with Peter Mennin, another young composer, who later became the director of Juilliard.

MOORE: What was the culture of classical music like in Rio de Janeiro in the forties? What sort of interest was there in modernism? What was the difference between Koellreutter’s pedagogy and the Brazilian professors?

KRIEGER: The teaching of music was very traditional. The School of Music of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, which was called the National School of Music at the time, trained virtually no prominent composers. At an earlier time there had been excellent professors of composition there, beginning with [Alberto] Nepomuceno, Henrique Oswald, who was a great composer, Francisco Braga, who was an excellent teacher. After the death of these great teachers, there was no continuity – the teachers who succeeded Braga used a very traditional pedagogy, which was academic in the worst sense of the word. The place was filled with retrograde academicism. I remember that the first time that there was talk of doing a piece by Schoenberg there was an incredible reaction – “this is not music, this is just madmen inventing a different system” – Schoenberg was taboo in this period. This was in Rio de Janeiro. The situation was less serious in São Paulo, because there was one composer, Camargo Guarnieri, who was fairly open-minded, even if he was strict in instruction in counterpoint, harmony and so forth. He was also an iron-willed defender of the nationalist aesthetic –he thought that all Brazilian music had to be based on musical elements of the popular culture of Brazil – folklore and so on. He was an excellent composer, and trained a number of generations of important composers. Some of them continued to work in the nationalist vein, and others didn't’t. Almeida Prado, for example, was a student of his who followed a different path. But when Koellreutter arrived here at the end of the thirties he began to show that there were other experiments that were going on then in Europe -- the Viennese school, with Schoenberg, Webern, etc., and this because some of his students, above all Claudio Santoro, began to get interested in this, to ask Koellreutter for information about it, and wanted to know, beyond traditional and nationalist music, what one could do, what the other paths were, the other possibilities, and they wanted to get up to date. And so he began to teach about serialism, and a little group got started to study it, which provoked a very violent reaction on the part of the traditionalists, the academicists, here in Rio de Janeiro, and in São Paulo, on the part of the nationalists. And so there were battles on two fronts against this opening that Koellreutter was proposing. It was period of many fights on aesthetic matters. Camargo Guarnieri wrote an unfortunate article defending nationalist music, and accusing Koellreutter of leading young Brazilians down the wrong path. Really, it was terrible. This was in the fifties. Later it all blew over. Today these are just historical matters. Nobody worries about whether you write nationalist music or not, whether you write serial music, or clusters, or perfect triads in C major. Nobody is worried about defending their thesis, but rather about simply writing the best possible music.

MOORE: What were the models, the ideal composers for the traditionalists in Rio de Janeiro?

KRIEGER: I can only tell you about the training I had at the time. There was a professor at the School of Music called J. Otaviano. He was a composer who had had a training that was extremely traditional, to make music in the style of Schumann, Beethoven... Debussy was already very advanced for him. So how did he teach composition? He used to have the students take a Beethoven sonata. You take the first movement of the sonata, and make an analysis from the point of view of structure – how many measures does the first theme have, how many measures, and in what tonality, does the second theme have? Is it in the dominant? How many measures in the transitions, in the development, and so forth. Having done this you mark your music paper, and write what you found in the analysis. After you have everything planned out on paper, then you close your Beethoven, and sit down to compose, using the schema you have written down. So it was a way of teaching music without any creativity, that is, a completely schematic approach – you copy the schema from Beethoven, rather than using your own creative fantasy. This was the dominant spirit in those days in Rio de Janeiro, which was the only place where composition was taught. So the parameters of this type of instruction were the sonatas of Beethoven, the music of Schumann – European music from the Romantic period. There was no Wagner, and Schoenberg was simply considered anti-music. This was the pattern. So when Koellreutter arrived and began to widen people’s perspectives, to show people how to understand the harmonic structures of Hindemith, what was called acoustic harmony, to study the acoustic principles of harmony, and not simply the rules – not just to avoid parallel fifths and octaves in the harmony, but to understand why – this way of teaching of Koellreutter’s provoked a very great reaction.

MOORE: The contrast between music teaching in New York and Rio de Janeiro must have been rather great.

KRIEGER: I really didn't’t notice such a great difference, because I went to New York after having been in Koellreutter’s school, which was open-minded. So for me, the music of Wallingford Riegger, whom I knew personally in New York, was not something strange, since it was already familiar from analysis and from the performance that we had promoted on the radio and in concerts, I already knew all this contemporary musical production. For me there was no shock. I suppose that a student who had learned to write sonatas according to Beethoven form and who arrived there would have noticed a big difference. But I had already left here with a different experience and a different vision of things. I had already begun to work with serial music. The pieces which I did in this period were all serial. When I went to study at Juilliard I asked Koellreutter if there was a composer there that he would recommend, and he knew a number of professors there, some composers that were serialists, including Wallinford Riegger, Roger Goeb, and he said to me, “Look, since you have already worked on serialism, you have already done a number of serial things, I recommend that you look for a teacher who is not a serialist, so that you can have another experience. There’s no point in going there and doing exactly what you were doing here for the last three, four, five years.” So I chose Peter Mennin, who had been student of Boulanger in Paris and came from a different school. And the things that I did at Juilliard were a different type of thing – not serial.

MOORE: It seems like nationalism in the United States was already played out by this point. For you and the other composers of your generation in Brazil was brasilidade an essential criterion for your music?

KRIEGER: Look, I would say the following: Brazilian music is a very strong presence in the shaping of a Brazilian composer in a general way. In my case, I grew up hearing music for Carnaval, serestas, music for band, and all this makes up part of a repertoire that your memory stores away. It’s part of you, part of your history, part of your auditory history. Even those who try to liberate themselves from a kind of academic nationalism retain this on an unconscious or subconscious level. I remember that in the period when we were working with serial music, with twelve-tone music, this topic would come up frequently for us. Is it possible with this type of language and technique to have some kind of presence of elements of Brazilian music, or if we use an advanced, free language, are we going to be confused with the composers from whatever part of the world who do this sort of thing? And some things came out of this type of discussion. For example Guerra-Peixe, a composer who had a training very much involved with Brazilian popular music, an arranger working for radio orchestra, but who was also very interested in these new directions, the possibilities opening up, of getting out of this vicious circle of academicism, wrote a string trio in this period with a second movement that had a lot to do with the seresta, but which was also twelve-tone. I wrote an experiment with a Choro for flute, which was strictly serial, but with rhythms from the Brazilian choro. This was something intentional, on purpose, a premeditated experiment. After a while this would come to be something spontaneous. Now, for example, I don’t see any incompatibility between using a very advanced harmonic language, and using elements, whether melodic, or rhythmic, from the Brazilian musical tradition. I think that Brazilian composers, more or less, have the same experience – not using Brazilian music as something which is a duty, as it was in the school of Camargo Guarnieri. After a certain point composers felt free of the obligation to do this. They write Brazilian music if it’s going to happen, they don’t have to avoid Brazilian elements in order to avoid seeming reactionary or traditionalist. So this dualism in Brazil is passé. I think this is very positive, since it is a way for you to write music that is not just like the serial music that is written in the United States or Europe, there is a component, a contribution from a culture that, after all, is important, Brazilian musical culture. Brazil created the material for this musical culture, whether from folklore, popular music, the rhythms – it’s very rich. In my concerto for two guitars, which is not serialist, is not an avant-garde work, not advanced in its language, but is free, in the second movement, for example, I used structures such as clusters, but at the same time, I use musical ideas and themes which come from the violeiros of the Northeast, melodic structures based on modes, and not on tonality, Mixolydian and Lydian modes, which are the modes used by the singers of the Northeast. This mixture of elements from tradition with aleatoric procedures, with contemporary procedures, is something which I think is interesting in Brazilian music today.

MOORE: In talking with a composer recently he suggested that thirty years ago, at least in the US, it was impossible for him to conceive of a life as a composer, but that he needed to work in the academy in order be able to support himself, in contrast to the situation today, where composers have a little more public presence. What is the relation in Brazil between classical music and the academic environment?

KRIEGER: In Brazil it is completely impossible to live as a composer, because compositional work in Brazil is something voluntary. It is rare for a composer to have a commission. I have had a fair amount – I have various works that were done on commission, but it is not normal. The majority of composers in Brazil really need to have some other means of supporting themselves, whether as teachers, often at universities and schools of music, which continue to be the main employers of the Brazilian composers, and which happily are still being created. When I began in the forties, there was really only one school of music which had a course in composition. Today there are various universities, and the School of Music itself is much more advanced in its pedagogy, and even has a department of electro-acoustic music. In addition, there are other universities which also have courses in composition – UniRio for example. In São Paulo, in the forties, there was only Camargo Guarnieri’s school, which was private. Today there are a number of universities in São Paulo, USP, UNESP, UniCamp, which are important centers of musical creativity. In Minas Gerais, there is a center at UFMG, and also UFRS in Rio Grande do Sul. Instruction in composition today is much more wide-spread. But normally composers need to work teaching music, or in other activities, generally in public agencies, in order to survive and do their compositional work in parallel. In my case, I am not a professor, but have always worked in public agencies. I began my professional life working for the radio of the Ministry of Education, doing programs on music. Later I directed various agencies, including the Foundation for Theaters in Rio de Janeiro, the National Foundation for the Arts (Funarte). I was director of the National Institute of Music, and this work guaranteed me enough to be able to survive, and in my free hours, which generally are always busy, to do music. This is the normal situation for all composers.

MOORE: Rio de Janeiro has a very busy musical life with many composers who have interesting works, and of course there is the Bienal. When did that get started?

KRIEGER: The Bienals of Contemporary Music began in 1975. They were really the continuation of two music festivals which I organized in 1969 and 1970, which were the Music Festivals of Guanabara. The festival in 1969 brought together for the first time fourteen works by young composers, for orchestra, or for chorus and orchestra, and this was something entirely new. Many critics said it was the most important thing since the Week of Modern Art in 1922 in São Paulo. And beginning with this festival, which had important prizes, that at the time were equivalent more or less to fifty thousand dollars, and with an international jury, which came to judge these national works at the Teatro Municipal, including Penderecki (Lutoslawski was invited, but couldn’t come at the last minute), Roque Cordero from Panama, Heitor Tosar from Uruguay, you had the first display of contemporary Brazilian composition. The first prize from this festival went to Almeida Prado, who nobody knew at the time. With this prize he spent two years in Paris, where he could study with Boulanger, with Messiaen. The next year the second festival had an international scope, with participants from other countries in the areas of symphonic and chamber music, and then there was a lapse of five years, because the secretary of culture who had decided to organize these festivals died, and his successor had no interest in them. I had prepared a project for the festival to take place biennially, someone found the project (it was Myriam Dauelsberg, the director of the Sala Cecília Meireles), and decided to carry it out. So the Bienals were started, which are still going on today. It’s interesting to note that the first Bienal had about thirty participating composers. The most recent Bienal had about a hundred and eighty. So these Bienals were an incentive, providing a new space where composers could hear their works performed, and many composers made their debuts with the inclusion of a work of theirs in a Bienal – Ronaldo Miranda, various other composers of the younger generation.

MOORE: Can you tell us about your recent projects?

KRIEGER: In 2000 there was the Sinfonia dos 500 Anos. Last year I did a cantata to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, called The Age of Knowledge, about the importance of knowledge in people’s lives. A wind quintet called Embalos, with movements based on the rhythmic structures of Brazilian music, in a rather free idiom. In the near future there will be the premiere of a piece called Passacaglia para Fred Schneiter, a Brazilian guitarist who died prematurely last year, and the Guitar Association is having a competition in his memory in Niterói, and they asked me to write a competition piece, which is going to have its debut now. I was recently in Karlsruhe for three months, and there I did some pieces for harpsichord called Momentos.

MOORE: Who will perform them?

KRIEGER: For now they have not been premiered. There was a Brazilian harpsichordist that I met there, but who has lived there for a long time. His name is Wilke Lahmann -- a German name, but he is Brazilian. He will do the premiere. I did a transcription for violin and two guitars of Sonâncias for a trio in Belgium with a Swedish violinist and the Assad Brothers, which also has not yet been premiered. This year I wrote three songs on sonnets by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, whose centenary is being celebrated this year. They will be premiered in August by a Brazilian baritone and pianist who organized a program in homage to the two great Brazilian poets, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Cecília Meireles.

MOORE: Have you seen increasing prominence for Brazilian classical music outside Brazil?

KRIEGER: Yes, I think so. In 2000, for example, in Karlsruhe, there was a program with ten days of Brazilian music in homage to the 500th anniversary of the discovery of Brazil. Ten Brazilian composers were present. In 1996 there was also a very important program of Brazilian music in New York, which was the occasion for the debut of the Concerto for Two Guitars by the Assads. At the time there were 20 Brazilian composers present, with concerts in Carnegie Hall and various other auditoriums.

Sometimes not attending opening night can be a good thing, especially in the case of a premiere. A "shake-down" cruise can be a shaky situation, and opening night can seem like a final dress rehearsal. By a week or so into a run, all the elements can be assembled for a demonstrative hit or miss.

OK, truth is, we didn't think we could score tickets to the first performance of John Adams's "Dr. Atomic," commissioned by San Francisco Opera, since critics were flying in from around the country and around the world. But that just allowed us the luxury of hearing how opinions were swirling about the work, before finally weighing in about a potential fat man or little boy of opera.

So, is it incandescent or a dud?

Well, it's not a blast, but it's not a fizzle, either. After a provocative electronic soundscape (a lesser-known arena for Adams), the tone is established immediately in the earnest choral overture "Matter can be neither created nor destroyed but only altered in form" (an intentionally outdated bit of science proved completely wrong by the course of events). The harsh lighting and massive weapons-of-mass-destruction scaffolding recall the design of Adams's previous "Death of Klinghoffer." Reminiscent as well was the use of a committed -- or even partisan -- Greek chorus; but unlike in the earlier opera, here the music is more in the manner of mass recitative. Paradoxically on the page, the music looks lyrical, as the phrases have repeating contours, but with the meticulous text setting and the sustained bass harmonies, we are clearly in a realm where the words at least as important as the music.

Well, isn't that the conundrum? Historically, since at least the birth of opera in the early 1600s, and indeed earlier going back to various religious traditions use of music, this has been among the great questions -- the relative importance of words/ideas vs. music/aesthetics (would they not be such a dichotomy, yet there it remains). And the solution that Claudio Monteverdi seemed to hit upon in "Orfeo" was one that Adams eerily replicated in "Klinghoffer": choruses in an "antique" style (for Monteverdi it was old-style renaissance madrigal, for Adams it was minimalism), and for solo singers it was a newer "reciting" style.

In "Dr. Atomic," Adams has clearly gone over to a mostly recitative realm, even in the choruses. As with Richard Wagner, Adams is a brilliant orchestrator and symphonic melodist. The singers seem to be along for the ride, sometimes connecting up with the overall musical-instrumental argument, but often left in their own tangle of words.

And there are a lot of them, in an engaging found-text libretto assembled by director and long-time Adams collaborator Peter Sellars -- government documents, reminiscences of project physicists, poetry by John Dunne, Hindu and Tewa writings. If it didn't add up all of the time, it was a noble effort, along with the flying pipes and overhead lights. Stimulating work was nevertheless heard from Richard Paul Fink, Gerald Finley, and Thomas Glenn, respectively as the forthright Edward Teller, pragmatic yet conscience-wracked J. Robert Oppenheimer (the titular comic-book inspired Dr. Atomic), and the idealistic Robert Wilson (not to be confused with liked-named stage director).

The "slow-movement / feminine" scenes (Act I, Scene ii, and Act II, Scene i) were perhaps the least successful moments, despite lovely efforts on the part of Kristine Jepson (Kitty Oppenheimer) and Beth Clayton (the Oppenheimer's Native-American nanny, Pasqualita). If J. Robert's fixation on the former's hair, however, became a bit of protracted stage business, By contrast the first Act's concluding Scene iii was incandescent. As a thunderstorm lit up the night sky with concerns that the test bomb might be prematurely detonated by a stray bolt of lightning, Adams provided the sturm-und-drang to match. There was even a visual homage to another nuclear-era opera in the slow progression of one of the bombs across the desert floor near Alamogordo -- a tip of the scenic hat to the Philip Glass / Wilson "Einstein on the Beach" slow-train procession. And the concluding Oppenheimer aria was as powerful as advertised, with hints of a Henry Purcell passacaglia (variations on a repeated bass line) in the repeated chromatic droopings setting Donne's "Batter my heart, three person'd God" -- whence the name of the Trinity test site.

Jepson delivered some winning vocalise in the beginning of Act II, while the bomb hung ominously sword-of-Damoclesesque over her infant's crib (the baby doll could have been a tad more realistic and the older child perhaps deserved more than a mere walk-on). While the poignantly-tense ensuing scene played out back in the desert with Glenn and Adams-interpreter-par-excellence James Maddalena (here as the meteorologist Jack Hubbard, who also created the title character in "Nixon in China" and the Captain-protagonist in "The Death of Klinghoffer"), that crib still loomed large under the bomb. Mercifully, it was finally moved before the final explosion.

Eric Owens was in fine form for comic relief as General Leslie Groves, ordering weathermen to give him a better report and confessing to his dietary foibles (the large chocolate bar seemed gratuitous -- and would that we have been given an aria for his calorie-counting, rather than yet another recitative). Even Adams has admitted, "It's hard to set English -- especially just plain flat-out prose like 'He said that I should go over and tell that to Oppenheimer' or something like that. I notice that when I'm composing I can get distracted and lose track of the necessity to make good vocal lines."

Well, yeah.

The bomb detonation had been billed as a whimper, or a sonic view from a distance, but, while it was not the aural cataclysm the Paul Dresher Ensemble provided in the Zellerbach premiere of Adams's "I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky" (the earthquake was subsequently cut from the recording, however), it as pretty impressive nonetheless, building up initially to another Trinitarian vision, this one Eastern, in an evocation of Vishnu: "At the Sight of your Shape stupendous, full of mouths and eyes." Here as elsewhere, Lucinda Childs (also a veteran from "Einstein") provided active and imaginative choreography -- excellently realized by the dancers and gamely attempted by most of the singers (who were consistently, attractively plus-sized to the dancers -- alas one older gentleman almost center stage, should have been removed to the sidelines as he simply could not get with the program).

The COUNTDOWN conclusion, while building inexorably in tension, was -- as was no doubt the reality -- a bit overlong. Harkening back to Olivier Messiaen's "St. Francis of Assisi," where the dear saint just lingered on for far too long and I found myself heretically thinking "Die already!" here the heinous thought was "explode the gadget, dammit!" It finally did, and somewhere around there was a demi-chorus of Cloud Flower Blossoms and Pasqualita getting to do an interpretive dance with tree branches.

It was a lot to pack into one evening, a brave-new-world game subject to tackle, and I am glad to have been there.

Premiere of John Adams's Doctor Atomic (libretto by Peter Sellars). War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, CA. 'As part of her initiative called The Faust Project, [Pamela] Rosenberg had approached [John] Adams with the idea of writing an opera on a 20th-century American Faust: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who presided over the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bombs. Though initially hesitant, Mr. Adams, who thinks big, could not resist. Nor could his longtime collaborator, the director Peter Sellars. In a risky stroke Mr. Sellars assembled a libretto from interviews with the project participants, history books, conversation transcripts, declassified documents and poetry. His cut-and-paste job has produced a libretto of heightened emotional resonance and surprising dramatic continuity. With Mr. Adams's haunting score, what results is a complex, searching and painfully honest if somewhat problematic opera. Doctor Atomic is the ultimate waiting game. It begins in June 1945 as the physicists, scientists and military personnel who are working at Los Alamos, N.M., are poised to test the first atomic bomb. The rest of the two-and-a-half-hour opera takes place on the night before and the morning of July 16, the day the first bomb was tested at the site that Oppenheimer, inspired by a John Donne poem, called Trinity. In a sense, not much happens: only that Oppenheimer and the other participants grapple with their consciences as the countdown to detonation, quite literally, commences. The Oppenheimer of Doctor Atomic is a true Faustian figure, a questing, cultured, brilliant and arrogant man, vividly portrayed by the charismatic Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who sings with burnished tone and makes every word count. As Mr. Sellars explained in a preperformance talk, Oppenheimer understood that by pushing science to new limits he would unleash barely imaginable forces in the world and even more fearsome forces within mankind. But he willed himself to turn off the part of his brain that processes ethical qualms about his work. The 'best people' in Washington will make these decisions for us scientists, he argues. In his talk, Mr. Sellars bemoaned today's culture, in which the government and the news media simplify everything with 'ridiculous crudeness.' Welcome to opera, he said, where we do not shy from ambiguity and complexity. Still, it takes great music to achieve this. Doctor Atomic, Mr. Adams's third full-fledged opera, may be his most inventive and emotional score to date, and the conductor Donald Runnicles drew a keen, compelling and assured performance from the orchestra. In his days as a fledgling composer, Mr. Adams rejected the academic atonality he was steeped in as a student and embraced minimalism, jazz, electronics, and experimental styles. But once over his rebellion, he increasingly allowed himself to incorporate elements of the more complex techniques he had been exposed to. In Doctor Atomic, Mr. Adams, 58, breaks new ground in that sphere. Whole spans of the orchestral and choral music tremble with textural density. Stacked-up clusters and polytonal harmonies have stunning bite and pungency. Skittish instrumental lines come close to sounding like riffs from a serialist score. The vocal writing is wondrously varied, sometimes jittery and naturalistic, sometimes melismatic and elegiac. You hear evocations of sci-fi film scores and bursts of Varèsian frenzy. When he needs to propel the music forward, Mr. Adams, true to form, creates a din of pummeling rhythms, fractured meters and jolting repeated figures: call it atomic minimalism. Yet tension runs even through the long, ruminative, wistful episodes, like the poignant bedtime scene between Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty. A sensitive and long-suffering alcoholic, Kitty was portrayed with touching vulnerability by the mezzo-soprano Kristine Jepson, though her diction was frustratingly mushy. Like Wagner's Erda, Kitty sees all too well the implications of the work that consumes her dazzling but remote husband. It seems right that the couple sometimes converse in a private language of quotations from sensual Baudelaire poems, for they cannot face each other with unblinking honesty. There are Wagnerian touches to the music beyond its orchestral lushness and bigness, in, for example, Mr. Adams's way of using the orchestra to comment on the story and the characters. One telling instance comes in a short scene with Gen. Leslie Groves, the blustery Army commander on the project. For a moment Groves forgets the mission and is drawn by Oppenheimer into a conversation about his weight problem. Dynamically portrayed by the husky bass Eric Owens, Groves shows Oppenheimer his calorie counter and talks about his diet regimen, which is not going well. Groves's chatter is enshrouded in luminous harmonies and pleading melodic lines, as if the orchestra sees the one person with the power to postpone the test in a fleeting moment of human frailty and tries to talk sense to him. Act I closes with a transfixing scene for Oppenheimer, when he recites that Donne sonnet, Batter my heart, three-person'd God, an abject surrender to God. Mr. Adams's setting is like some contemporary evocation of an intricately contrapuntal Renaissance song with a tortured melodic line and unstable modal harmonies. Other standouts in the cast include the baritone Richard Paul Fink, who uses his stentorian singing to mask the manipulative ways of the physicist Edward Teller, who would become Oppenheimer's nemesis during the McCarthy years. The elegant baritone James Maddalena (who created the title role in Mr. Adams's "Nixon in China") portrays the meteorologist Jack Hubbard, who must suffer the tirades of General Groves. The mezzo-soprano Beth Clayton made an impact in two mysterious scenes as the Oppenheimers' maid, who sings totemic songs to the couple's children. The tenor Thomas Glenn brought his sweet voice and boyish innocence to the role of Robert Wilson, a young idealistic physicist plagued with guilt about the test. Alas, the musical performance was troubled by balance problems, which were not helped by the use of amplification. Electronic elements have long been part of the Adams style. Since the large orchestra was electronically enhanced, the solo singers had to wear wireless microphones. Introducing amplification into opera is Mr. Adams's prerogative. But if you are going to abandon 400 years of tradition and amplify singers to get the balances right, then get the balances right. All other aspects of Mr. Sellars's production are remarkable. Adrianne Lobel's striking sets use movable columns and sliding lab tables filled with plutonium cores and other gadgets, set against a silhouette of New Mexico mountains. The costume designer Dunya Ramicova dresses the chorus as 1940's scientists, technicians and workers, who remind us that the Manhattan Project employed thousands of workers. The choreographer Lucinda Childs uses dancers to "physicalize the anxiety of waiting," in Mr. Sellars's words, and lend a quality of abstraction to the affecting and graceful staging. The waiting, of course, culminates in the detonation. Before he composed a note Mr. Adams knew that any attempt to depict an atomic explosion in music would be clichéd on arrival. His solution is ingenious. As the moment approaches and the battering-ram orchestra seems to be sounding inside your head, suddenly all goes quiet and we experience the detonation as if we were 200 miles away in Los Alamos. The music is delicate, strange, melodically dispersed, harmonically tentative. You sense the atmosphere crackling, the world changing. The calm voice of a Japanese woman is heard. We know what comes next. But that is for a sequel. Maybe Ms. Rosenberg is already on the case" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 10/3/05].

October 11

Juilliard Orchestra, led by Dennis Russell Davies, in The Juilliard School presents its 100th Anniversary Concert. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "And that was it for hoopla. There were no speeches, ceremonies, awards, potted-history films -- just a concert, with a newly commissioned work as its centerpiece, and scores by Webern and Schubert at either end. Some listeners may have wanted a greater sense of occasion, but simply showing what the school's young musicians can do made tremendous sense. The piece commissioned for the concert was the Manhattan Trilogy by Einojuhani Rautavaara, the patriarch of contemporary Finnish composers. Mr. Rautavaara is much loved internationally these days, and for good reason. But it would be unnatural not to wonder why this quintessentially American conservatory didn't program a new American work as the main draw of its anniversary concert -- or even as one of the outlying scores. Perhaps the presence on the podium of Mr. Davies, a particularly eloquent interpreter of American music, made the absence of any all the more puzzling. Maybe it's a silly question. There are new American scores elsewhere in the season, and at this point, American composers are doing well enough in the world not to need a boost at every local celebration. There is, in any case, a Juilliard connection here: Mr. Rautavaara was a student there in the 1950's, and his three-movement, 20-minute work is a reminiscence of the hopes and anxieties of his student years. It is a wistful, conservative work. The outer movements, Daydreams and Dawn, are cast in consonant but freely modulating chord progressions, with achingly beautiful solo lines darting through the thick textures. Even the central Nightmares movement, though darker and more freely dissonant, often has a lush quality. If Mr. Rautavaara is remembering tensions and uncertainties here, as the program notes suggest, he is doing it from a comfortable distance. Mr. Davies let his musicians revel in Mr. Rautavaara's rich textures, and they played it as if they had lived with it for years. It sounded, in any case, like the most thoroughly rehearsed of the three scores on the program, although the performances of Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra (Op. 6) and the Schubert Ninth Symphony offered little reason for complaint. There were, for example, fleetingly tentative moments in the brass during the outer movements of the Webern, but the salient feature of the performance was the fluidity and seamlessness with which these young players moved through the constantly changing textures" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/13/05].

October 20

Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Can Pierre Boulez ever have imagined that four short piano pieces from his steely, rigorously dodecaphonic and anti-establishment "Notations" would be played as an encore during a recital at Carnegie Hall? And who would have thought that this radical early Boulez work would sound so right coming after an exhilarating performance of Schumann's crowd-pleasing Carnaval? But this is what Pierre-Laurent Aimard pulled off in his stunning . . . recital . . . . As those tuned in to contemporary-music circles know, in 1977 Mr. Aimard, then just 19, became a founding member of Mr. Boulez's avant-garde Ensemble InterContemporain in Paris, remaining with the group for 18 years. But since then, Mr. Aimard has been branching into standard repertory, winning wide acclaim for his extraordinary pianism without losing his identity as a musician immersed in his own time. Mr. Aimard enjoys playing old and new works together in provocative contexts. He opened this fascinating program with four of Debussy's Préludes, Book I. Seated at the piano, he waited for well over a minute, until stragglers in the audience arrived and the house was quiet, so he could start the mysterious and searching Delphic Dancers, which begins in a whisper. In this haunting performance, with harmonically unhinged chords voiced so tellingly and textures boldly blurred, Debussy's alluring prelude sounded like the radical work it was and, in a sense, still is. The Wind on the Plain followed, sounding here like an onrushing intimation of a Ligeti étude. Mr. Aimard then began the hushed Sounds and Perfumes Swirl in the Evening Air, but stopped just moments into it because something else was swirling in air at Carnegie Hall: coughing. He begged the audience's pardon and reminded everyone that coughing is "the enemy of music." With the house now utterly quiet, he continued, then ended the set with a jocular yet curiously unsettling account of Puck's Dance. Having presented Debussy as a modernist, he played Mr. Boulez's staggeringly difficult Piano Sonata No. 1, written in 1946 when the composer was in his early 20's and instigating an assault on the musical status quo in Paris. Even those who find Mr. Boulez's serial works baffling had to have responded to the subtlety, color, rhythmic bite and rhapsodic sweep of Mr. Aimard's arresting performance. He then gave a coolly beautiful and commanding account of Ravel's formidable Gaspard de la Nuit, played without a hint of sentimentality, never milking this inventive score for virtuosic flash. The Schumann was not what you might have expected. Mr. Aimard played with plenty of Romantic impetuosity and even a judicious use of rubato. Yet this was also a bracing and vigorous take on Schumann's suite of dances, evocations and portraits. In introducing the Boulez encore, Mr. Aimard explained that, like the Schumann work, Notations is also a suite of short character pieces, all derived from a few basic motifs. The audience must have gotten the connection, for on this night, Boulez won as many bravos as Schumann, thanks to Mr. Aimard's ingenious artistry" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 10/22/05].

October 29

Christopher Taylor plays Gyorgy Ligeti's Etudes. Miller Theatre, New York, NY. "Do not make assumptions about the American pianist Christopher Taylor from his bookish, gangly and endearingly nerdy appearance. Beneath that professorial persona is a demonically intense artist with a stunning technique and searching intellect. In recent seasons Mr. Taylor, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has been finding the Miller Theater at Columbia University an ideal place to try out programs that most mainstream concert presenters would never go for. In the process he has attracted a following, which explains why a capacity crowd was drawn to . . . hear his recital devoted to the complete études for piano by Gyorgy Ligeti. Surely, most of this noticeably young audience could not have been familiar with these cutting-edge works by this Hungarian master composer. Just knowing that Mr. Taylor was up to something again was apparently enough to fill the hall. At the Miller in 2001 Mr. Taylor gave an exhilarating performance of Messiaen's complete Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus, some of the most visionary and challenging music ever written for the piano. Last year he returned for a program of contemporary études, 27 demanding works by George Perle, William Bolcom, Derek Bermel and Mr. Ligeti (Book 1, the first six, of the études, composed in 1985, though the composer, who is 82, has spoken of writing more). While Mr. Ligeti has written about being frustrated with his own limited piano technique, Mr. Taylor, in his program note, writes that producing marvels like these études requires "complete mastery of the instrument's potential as well as flawless intuition concerning the hand's abilities." Mr. Ligeti points to unusual sources of inspiration for these works, including the polyrhythmic music of sub-Saharan Africa, the jazz composers Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans, the mechanistic piano pieces of Conlon Nancarrow, and even the fractal geometry of Mandelbrot and Peitgen, which particularly interests Mr. Taylor, who graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from Harvard in 1992. There are surprisingly serene episodes in several of the études, like the wistful opening section of White on White, with its churchly harmonies, and the brittle, gently clanking passages in Fém, which suggests music made by breezes blowing through a pagoda. Some études have less overt challenges, like Vertige, in which the pianist must execute twisting strands of bizarre, hard-to-finger chromatic runs. But most of the études are vehemently intense and ferociously difficult, like the crazed À bout de souffle, with its pummeling chords and arm-blurring repetitions, or The Devil's Staircase, which makes Liszt's Mephisto Waltz seem like a jolly little Hungarian dance. Mr. Taylor played them all with incisive rhythm, lucid textures and, where the music allowed, alluring colors. Still, the sheer effort involved in playing these works was something to behold" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 10/31/06].

Roger Waters. Ca Ira. Sony Classical. "With Ça Ira, his new opera about the French Revolution, just released on a Sony Classical recording, Roger Waters joins a parade of rock stars who apparently harbor dreams of tuxedos and podiums. Sir Paul McCartney has written a handful of orchestral and choral works, large and small. Stewart Copeland, of the Police, beat Mr. Waters to the punch with his own opera, Holy Blood and Crescent Moon. Billy Joel has recorded an album's worth of piano pieces, and Elvis Costello, with a ballet behind him, has written an opera as well. It seems to be a part of the human condition that having established a specialty, we hanker to do something else. And far be it from me to say that we shouldn't. But speaking as a classical music critic who also listens to lots of rock -- and who wishes that more rock fans found classical music exciting as well -- I must confess that I find many of these crossover incursions dispiriting. For one thing, rock stars who become interested in classical music are bizarrely conservative. They may play the most electrifying, guitar-thrashing, edge-of-the-seat stuff with their own bands, but when they decide to write classical music, or what they think of as classical music, they reach for a quill instead of a pen. With the notable exception of Frank Zappa, whose reams of classical music reflect his fascination with Edgard Varèse and other modernists, rock musicians seem to think that the conventions of the 19th century are classical music's current language. Mr. Waters ought to have escaped that conservatism. His former band, Pink Floyd, was known for its almost symphonic experiments in timbre, structure and controlled dissonance. Its quasi-operatic magnum opus, The Wall, was thoroughly Mr. Waters's baby. Yet the overture to Ça Ira (So It Will Be) is couched in Brahmsian moves and sonorities, and the work rarely lurches forward. A listener soon bumps into orchestral effects that have their roots in Beethoven's Egmont or, in more adventurous passages, Puccini's Tosca or the Battle on the Ice from Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky. Maybe Mr. Waters is mistaken to call this an opera. Yes, there are operatic things about it. The vocal writing is lyrical and often attractive, even if there is little in the way of full-fledged aria writing. There is a hefty amount of choral music, and it is supported by a rich orchestral score (Mr. Waters had some help in the orchestration from Rick Wentworth, who conducts the recording). And there are recognizably operatic voices: the baritone Bryn Terfel, the tenor Paul Groves and the soprano Ying Huang each sing several roles. But if you were to walk into a room in which the CD happened to be playing, you would be far less likely to say, 'Hey, it's an opera' than 'Hey, it's one of those overblown musicals that have taken over Broadway' -- or words to that effect. . . . From a purely theatrical point of view, Ça Ira has a few nice touches: not least, the idea of presenting the early stages of the French Revolution as a three-ring circus, with the Ringmaster (one of Mr. Terfel's roles) as a kind of singing history book and commentator. And it deals artfully with serious issues like tyranny, power, liberty and the difficulty of preventing revolutionary passions from being transformed into a form of terror that threatens to negate what has been gained. No doubt there are some in classical music circles who see a sterling opportunity here, and a decade ago, I would have been one of them. In theory, rock stars who write classical works are telling their audiences that they see something special in this music, something inspiring in the old forms and in the idea of writing for orchestra and unamplified voices. And it isn't unreasonable to expect that a new audience might be enlisted from fans who want to understand what drives their heroes, and who want to like what their heroes like. When rock fans in the United States bought the first albums by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Kinks, they encountered cover versions of American rhythm-and-blues hits that white American listeners had ignored, and they quickly sought out the originals. Linda Ronstadt's excursions into the worlds of Gilbert and Sullivan and cabaret standards in the 1980's had a similar effect. But rock fans barely tolerate classical music adventures by the musicians they admire. Sir Paul's fans snapped up his Liverpool Oratorio, Standing Stone, and Working Classical albums out of curiosity or because they were completists, but you suspect that few who weren't already interested in classical music actually play those discs. When Sir Paul presided over a program of his orchestral music at Carnegie Hall in 1997, the place was packed with people who sought a glimpse of him but who nodded off during the performances. These crossovers tend not to do well from the other direction, either. Classical listeners find Billy Joel's piano tinkling embarrassing and have been brutally critical of other musicians' efforts as well. They may find it offensive that these musicians can get their baby steps recorded by major labels while trained, experienced, eloquent composers who don't have rock affiliations have to pass the hat. So here's where rock stars enamored of classical music can make a difference. When they make their first classical albums, they might consider devoting their royalties -- a pittance, compared with those generated by their other work -- to a fund that would support recordings by actual classical composers. 'Yeah, right,' you say, but there is a precedent of sorts. In 1989, Elliott Carter received a telephone call from Phil Lesh, the bassist for the Grateful Dead. Mr. Carter had no idea what the Grateful Dead was, but when he and Mr. Lesh met, the following May, Mr. Lesh brought a stack of Mr. Carter's music, which he knew intimately. Mr. Lesh, it turned out, wanted to underwrite a recording of Mr. Carter's music through the Grateful Dead's Rex Foundation, which has quietly given grants to other composers as well. Now that's doing something useful. If Mr. Lesh wrote and recorded an opera, I'd happily give it a spin" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 9/28/05].

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Wynton [Learson] Marsalis (b. October 18, 1961) was born to Dolores (née Ferdinand) and Ellis Marsalis, Jr., a New Orleans-based music teacher and pianist. He is the second of six sons: Branford (1960), Wynton (1961), Ellis III (1964), Delfeayo (1965), Mboya Kinyatta (1971), and Jason (1977). Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason are also jazz musicians. Ellis is a poet, photographer and network engineer based in Baltimore. Mboya was born with autism.

At an early age Marsalis demonstrated an aptitude and interest for music. Al Hirt gave a six-year-old Marsalis his first trumpe, and age eight he performed traditional New Orleans music in the Fairview Baptist Church band led by banjoist, Danny Barker. By 14, he was invited to perform with the New Orleans Philharmonic. During his high school years attending Benjamin Franklin High School, Marsalis was a member of the New Orleans Symphony Brass Quintet, New Orleans Community Concert Band, under the direction of Peter Dombourian, New Orleans Youth Orchestra, New Orleans Symphony, and on weekends performed in a jazz band as well as a local funk band, the Creators.

He moved to New York City to attend the Juilliard School of Music in 1978. Two years later in 1980, he joined the Jazz Messengers to study under drummer and bandleader, Art Blakey, during which time Marsalis gleaned from Blakey how to lead a band and how to how perform with intensity and consistency. In 1981, Marsalis toured with the Herbie Hancock quartet throughout the USA and Japan, as well as performing at the Newport Jazz Festival with Herbie. During his career Marsalis has played with artists including Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Edison, Clark Terry, and Sonny Rollins.

Not all, however, were willing collaborators. Miles Davis hedged his praise of Marsalis by strongly suggesting that he was unoriginal and too competitive, saying "Wynton thinks playing music is about blowing people up on stage." In 1986, in Vancouver, an uninvited Marsalis tried to join an angered Davis on stage. Davis said "Wynton can't play the kind of shit we were playing", and twice told the rival trumpeter to leave the stage saying "Get the fuck off."

Marsalis assembled his own band and performed over 120 concerts every year for ten consecutive seasons. Through an extensive series of performances, lectures, and music workshops, he helped generate interest in an art form that had lost much of its artistic substance. As Marsalis focused attention on older jazz musicians, many record companies had re-issued out-of-print recordings from their catalogues. Many students of Marsalis's workshops, and collaborators have included James Carter; Christian McBride; Roy Hargrove; Harry Connick, Jr.; Nicholas Payton; Eric Reed; and Eric Lewis.

He has been commissioned to compose for Dance companies including Garth Fagan Dance, Peter Martins at the New York City Ballet, Twyla Tharp for the American Ballet Theatre, and also for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre.

Marsalis provided the score for the 1990 film Tune in Tomorrow, in which he also makes a cameo appearance as a New Orleans trumpeter with his band.

He collaborated with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1995 to compose the string quartet, At The Octoroon Balls, Marsalis's first string quartet, performed by the Orion Quartet.

In 1997, his epic oratorio on slavery, Blood on the Fields, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music.

Nevertheless, that year also brought out the publication of Blue: The Murder of Jazz, in which Eric Nisenson argued that Marsalis's focus on a narrow portion of jazz's past was stifling the music's growth and preventing any further innovation.

A second commision by Lincoln Center in 1998 allowed Marsalis to produce a creative response to Igor Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat with a companion piece, A Fiddler's Tale, which premiered on April 23 of that year at Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan. A version without narration is paired with At the Octoroon Balls on a release available at the composer's website.

Marsalis compositions and playing is represented on a quartet of Sony Classical releases, At the Octoroon Balls: String Quartet No. 1, A Fiddler's Tale, Reel Time, and Sweet Releaseand Ghost Story: Two More Ballets by Wynton Marsalis. All are volumes of an eight-CD series, entitled Swinging Into The 21st, a set of albums released in 1999-2000, featuring original compositions and standard repertory, including works of Jelly Roll Morton, Igor Stravinsky, and Thelonious Monk. Reeltime is Marsalis's score for John Singleton's film Rosewood. This original music, featuring vocals by Cassandra Wilson and Shirley Caesar, was never used in the film.

Marsalis's has been criticized as a minor trumpeter who promulgates controversial and pedantic opinions on jazz. Down Beat magazine's website reports that Marsalis is viewed by many as a savior of pure jazz from "pop fusion and noise," while others have regarded his music and notions regarding jazz as "regressive."

Pierre Sprey, president of jazz record company Mapleshade Records, said in 2001 that "When Marsalis was nineteen, he was a fine jazz trumpeter ... But he was getting his tail beat off every night in Art Blakey's band. I don't think he could keep up. And finally he retreated to safe waters. He's a good classical trumpeter and thus he sees jazz as being a classical Music. He has no clue what's going on now."

Marsalis has also been criticized for his role in the Ken Burns documentary Jazz (2001), which promoted a classicist view of jazz similar to his own. The documentary focused primarily on Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong among others, while failing to mention jazz artists that Marsalis has disparged.

The documentary also angered many with subjective statements, often from Marsalis, about the comparative complexity, popularity, and general worth of the music of a wide variety of artists.

As artistic director and co-producer of the project, Marsalis was an object of many of the criticisms of the series, which was also highly acclaimed. Critic David Adler has suggested his production role was a conflict of interest with his high onscreen profile: "Wynton's coronation in the film is not merely biased. It is not just aesthetically grating. It is unethical, given his integral role in the making of the very film that is praising him to the heavens."

Marsalis emerged as a New Orleans booster in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this past August, by making public speeches and television ads to increase public awareness of the importance of rebuilding New Orleans, and also to encourage tourism of Louisiana.

Richard Strauss's Capriccio. New York, NY. "Richard Strauss called Capriccio, his final opera, a 'conversation piece for music,' an unconventional but apt description. It's a dialectical opera about an aesthetic question: What comes first in opera, the music or the words? Do words determine music, or does music flesh out and give breadth to words? Strauss's conceit for dramatizing the question was to concoct a story of aristocratic courtship in 18th-century France. Flamand, a composer, and Olivier, a poet, vie for the affections of Madeleine, a young, widowed countess. The whole opera takes place in the drawing room of her chateau outside Paris. And nothing much happens but a lot of talk about the hierarchy of poetry and music. "Capriccio" has long been considered an insiders-only opera, musically refined and intellectually intriguing but dramatically static. So you can understand why the director Stephen Lawless decided to open up and energize this seldom-seen work in the production he has created for the New York City Opera, which was unveiled on Wednesday night at the New York State Theater to inaugurate the company's 62nd season. Mr. Lawless has moved the action, such as it is, from the countess's drawing room to a small but elegant theater and updated the setting to roughly the period when Strauss composed it (The Munich premiere was in 1942). Zapping the tale to modern times creates some havoc, naturally. The story is meant to be set at the time when Gluck's bold reforms of opera were the talk of Paris. And moving the action to a theater makes sense only if you accept that the countess's chateau was a grand affair with its own mini-opera house, which it could have been, of course. There she has brought together Flamand and Olivier, as well as a blustery and pragmatic theater director, La Roche, some singers, dancers and guests, who are all planning a birthday party for their hostess. In effect, they are checking out the space they will be working in. Fans of the opera are likely to miss the drawing-room setting of the original. Strauss surely meant Flamand and Olivier to come across as earnest dilettantes. Only dilettantes have time to sit around a salon arguing endlessly about unanswerable aesthetic questions. Yet there are appealing aspects to the concept. Ashley Martin-Davis, the set and costume designer, has rendered a theater that has not seen much activity for a while. At first the audience seats and chandeliers are draped with black cloths. Competing platforms in different sections of the stage offer work spaces for Flamand with his harpsichord and Olivier with his writing desk. The main problem, though, is that in milking the opera for humor, Mr. Lawless goes too far. Strauss pokes musically clever fun at Italian opera, French ballet and mythological tragedy by having some performers appear at the salon to give the countess and her guests a hint of what they have in store for the party. But here the Italian tenor (Barry Banks) is a Caruso caricature with a cashmere coat slung over his shoulders; the Italian soprano (Lisa Saffer in an ungratifying role) is a crude gum-chewing diva; and there is a whole zany roster of exotic dancers and preening tragediennes. The scene, meant to be smart and amusing, becomes a laugh riot. Still, Mr. Lawless has drawn some nuanced portrayals from an appealing cast. The soprano Pamela Armstrong makes a bright-voiced, lovely and admirable countess. The ardent tenor Ryan MacPherson is a dashing and impetuous Flamand. Mel Ulrich brings his hardy baritone voice, imposing presence and intensity to the role of Olivier. The bass Eric Halfvarson nearly steals the show as La Roche. Of course we are meant to chuckle at the theater director's diatribes as he extols the superiority of Italian comic opera, which gives the public real people - pepper peddlers and soap makers - instead of absurd Turks and Greeks and mythical beings in pretentious tragedies. But he is filled with a common sense that the poet and the composer should listen to. Making strong company debuts were the baritone George Mosley as the count, Madeleine's brother, and the mezzo-soprano Claire Powell as Clairon, the wily actress the count is smitten by. The conductor George Manahan caught the ebbs and flows of this fitful and elusive score, which hews closely to every turn of phrase in the libretto (by Clemens Krauss and Strauss). The glory of the opera is the lyrically sublime final scene for the countess, who, in trying to decide between her suitors and to answer the aesthetic questions they have posed, confronts the painful yet human arbitrariness of all choices. Here Strauss gives his hand away, though. Music wins, hands down. Ms. Armstrong sang this famous monologue with sensitivity, despite the melodramatic final image Mr. Lawless devises. Instead of pondering the questions alone in her salon, wistfully singing the song Flamand has composed to Olivier's sonnet while strumming her harp, she takes the stage of her theater like a diva, bathed in floods of golden light, singing and playing the love ode while the entire stage platform moves forward. And on Wednesday the stage moved creakily, which certainly undermined the intended effect" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/9/05].

September 8

Mari Kimura and Yoshihiro Kanno's Project RITE (Reinventing Tradition and Environment). Chelsea Art Center, New York, NY. "Mari Kimura had planned to follow the traditional career trajectory for violinists -- performances of standard repertory and some new music -- when a chance conversation made her reconsider. Her interlocutor, on hearing that she was a violinist, asked Ms. Kimura whether she composed, and when the answer was no, he asked her why not. For Ms. Kimura, it was a good question, so she started writing music, including works for violin and computer. And she began collaborating with like-minded performer-composers. [In h]er latest endeavor . . . she is joined by performers who play ancient Asian instruments and also compose and use computers. She is presenting two installments . . . and the first . . . explored the interaction among the violin, the koto . . . , the shakuhachi . . . , the sho . . . , and a handful of Apple laptops. Bruce Gremo opened the program with New Old Song 2, a solo work for shakuhachi and computer in which the boundaries between the flute and the electronics were blurred at first. The shakuhachi can produce some surprisingly textured and eerie sounds, even without electronic support. Mr. Gremo's computer line used these timbres (and plenty of atmospheric reverberation) as starting points and ran with them, exaggerating the textures until they sounded like electronic feedback, and using electronic delays to create a spacey polyphony. Tamami Tono, a sho player and composer, followed similar lines in Arc for the Breath of Life, for sho, computer and Ms. Kimura's violin. Miya Masaoka did, too, in Something Comes Then Sails Away, for koto - which Ms. Masaoka sometimes played with a bow - computer and sho. In both, ancient timbres were explored and extended, on their own and through their interaction with the computer. And both, like Mr. Gremo's work, had a meandering, New Age quality. Ms. Kimura's Pluck-Ring, for violin, computer, and TibetBot -- an electronic device that, among other things, rings temple bells -- had a slightly tougher edge, as well as the benefit of computer graphics, a stream of constantly shifting geometric shapes that she produced with Liubomir Borissov. The most imaginative work on the program was Mr. Kanno's City of Wind, a haunting, melancholy work that brought together all the musicians as well as Mr. Kanno on keyboards. In it, Mr. Kanno probed a variety of wind sounds, ranging from those that drive the shakuhachi and the sho to a desolate, distant, hollow howl produced by the computer. Ms. Kimura and company closed the concert with a vigorous, concise improvisation that she said was called Dessert [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 9/10/05].

Opera for All, including a performance by Rufus Wainwright and an excerpt from Giacomo Puccini's Turandot. New York City Opera, New York, NY. A second program of the latter's Madama Butterfly is presented the following evening.

September 9

counter/induction. New York, NY. "It's easy to poke fun at the popular image of contemporary chamber music ensembles as scrappy collectives of composers and performers who give concerts in downtown lofts before audiences of 50 people, most of whom have been conscripted to attend by friends in the ensemble. In truth, that image is often borne out at these events. So what? As the brilliantly performed program . . . by counter)induction, the New York-based contemporary music collective, proved, hearing new and recent works in such settings can be the most bracing of musical experiences. The core members of this collective are two composers, Kyle Bartlett and Douglas Boyce, and five impressive instrumentalists: Benjamin Fingland (clarinet), Asmira Woodward-Page (violin), Jessica Meyer (viola), Sumire Kudo (cello) and Blair McMillen (piano). The concert took place at the Tenri Cultural Institute on West 13th Street in a wonderfully intimate art gallery with vibrant paintings from an exhibition of Japanese artists filling the walls. The place was packed, meaning that roughly 65 people attended. I've seldom been among such intensely focused listeners. How could you not have been drawn in when the music was so provocative, the setting so inviting and the performances so compelling? The opening work, Eric Moe's And Life Like Froth Doth Throb, snapped the audience to attention. In this short, perpetual-motion tour de force for viola and cello, the two players trade off relentless eighth-note ostinatos. Fragments of themes try to take off but get pulled into the frenetic rush. Mr. Boyce's 102nd and Amsterdam, for violin, viola and cello, which received its premiere, begins with a long episode of intensely soft squiggles, glissandos and shimmers. Once in a while a moaning rumination for the cello or an aborted melody for the violin break through and bring the diffuse harmonies into focus, though some fitful middle sections also threaten the uneasy calm. Eli Marshal's Opus Prime for piano, violin and cello sounded like some crazed, metrically fractured rondo by a latter-day Ravel. Alexandre Lunsqui's After Frottage, though intriguing, tested one's patience. Scored for wailing clarinet and bustling cello, the music seemed like the harmonically unhinged and extended transitional section of a longer chamber work. The program included one piece by an older-generation composer, Karel Husa's 1982 Sonata a Tre, for clarinet, piano and violin. This riveting trio shifts between atmospherics, startling solo cadenzas, episodes of fidgety almost Neo-Classical counterpoint and spasms of wildness. The performers nailed the challenging score, especially the formidable young Mr. McMillen at the piano. All five performers also proved masterly in the final work, Georges Aperghis's daunting Mouvement Pour Quintette, ecstatic music that could be called Messiaenic. With admission by donation and complimentary wine and pretzels in the lobby afterward, this concert offered New Yorkers with a sense of musical adventure and limited budgets a great way to spend a weekend evening" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/12/05].

Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly. New York City Opera, New York, NY. "[T]he company presented straight opera - Puccini's "Madama Butterfly," in one of its best productions - and bedded it in introductions from Paul Kellogg (City Opera's general and artistic director), the actress Cynthia Nixon and a very good documentary film that gave a behind-the-scenes look, from singers, stagehands, the production team, etc., about what it's like to put this thing on. For all of you who are new to opera, here's another part of your introduction: the review, which many people see as the part where the critic takes something they liked and tears it apart. For me, as someone who loves opera, the point is actually to encourage everyone to think more critically about what they did and didn't like and challenge the things that didn't work, rather than simply praising it for being lovely and letting people continue to believe that if they don't like classical music, the fault lies with them rather than a possibly indifferent performance. But I don't think City Opera's performance Friday night was indifferent. There was a lot to like here, even beyond the music, starting with Mark Lamos's simple, beautiful production. The orchestra, under Ari Pelto, had its moments, though there were quite a few muddy patches, and the supporting cast - Robert Mack as Goro, Kathryn Friest as Suzuki, Jake Gardner as an urbane Sharpless - was strong. The weakness lay with the two leads, who were visually attractive but lacked the vocal goods to do more than simply act as place-holders, going through the motions of the Butterfly tradition. . . . This doesn't mean, though, that you were wrong if you liked it. What it means is that if you liked it, there are more nice things in store for you" [Anne Midgette, The New York Times, 9/12/05].

September 12

Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players in Bela Bartok's Piano Quintet. Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church, New York, NY. "[Adam] Nieman presided over a steamy account of Bartok's youthful Piano Quintet, a work in which Bartok's own voice can be heard just starting to peek through but that otherwise shows the influences of Liszt, Brahms and Strauss. . . . [The performance was electrifying" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 9/14/05].

September 11

Argento New Music Project in French Connections. Merkin Hall, New York, NY. "[T]he program began with a man seducing a double bass. Jacob Druckman's Valentine has dated somewhat since it was written in 1970. It deals with aspects of performance beyond simply making notes, casting the relationship between a performer and his instrument - starting cold, warming up, getting into the thick of the music - in purely sexual terms. In showing all the ways you can approach the issue of drawing sound from a resonating body, it also makes some sounds that are interesting to hear: shudders and percussive thwacks and wonderful thick, chewy clicking sounds emanating simultaneously from the performer's tongue and the instrument's strings. It was a nice little set piece, and Kevin Weng-Yew Mayner performed it fabulously, without a trace of self-consciousness. If it wasn't quite indicative, the piece did give a sense of the flavor of the . . . concert . . . . That is, it was an entertaining piece by a composer with intellectual chops; and beyond mere musical concept, it traded in emotion, expressivity and, yes, enjoyment. None of the other four pieces on the program were as openly antic. The French Connections . . . indicated that two members of the group have worked in France: Michel Galante at Ircam, Michael Klingbeil with the composer Tristan Murail. Mr. Galante's Leaves of Absence II, a parabolic arc of music for octet, and Mr. Klingbeil's episodic, slightly ponderous Monoliths and Interludes for solo piano, beautifully played by Augustus Arnone, had their world premieres on this program. The other French element was a French composer, Philippe Hurel, whose nice pieces were a highlight of the evening. Loops, for solo flute (played by Erin Lesser), began with a flourish and gradually wrought changes on the gesture, note by note, in a way that was melodically engaging, not merely mechanical. And 4 Variations was a virtuosic anticoncerto for percussion and ensemble in which vibraphone was gradually submerged in a bright tapestry of sound. Matt Ward was the fine soloist, and Mr. Galante conducted the end of what proved to be a cheerful evening" [Anne Midgette, The New York Times, 9/13/05].

September 15

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Gala. New York, NY "These exploratory artists [cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han], who happen to be married to each other, have thought outside the box and undertaken projects as recording producers, educators and administrators. oncertgoers will have to wait until next season, though, to see what kinds of programs they have in mind, since their appointment came after the current season was planned. Still, Mr. Finckel and Ms. Han gave a hint of their thinking with [their] gala, which they did devise. If a program focusing on Eastern European music from Dvorak to Bartok was not particularly daring, the choice of works showed creativity and the performances were top-notch. Another musically eminent couple, the pianist Emanuel Ax and Yoko Nozaki . . . [performed] Bartok's 1937 Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, joined by the dynamic percussionists Don S. Liuzzi and Ayano Kataoka. For 30 minutes all that mattered was this riveting performance of a stunning 20th-century masterpiece. By scoring the work as he did, Bartok forces the piano to stop pretending otherwise and embrace its identity as a member of the percussion family. This is not to imply that the piano writing is unduly steely and that the music lacks lush harmony, fetching colors and lyricism. Indeed, the yearning second theme of the first movement, which slinks up and down the keyboards in astringent chords of stacked-up fourths, is achingly melodic. After intermission Ms. Wu gave a lively spoken introduction to a group of salon pieces for viola and piano by the Romanian-born composer Georges Boulanger (1893-1958). Though these Gypsy fiddler tunes were not much more than high-class novelties, Paul Neubauer and Ms. Han milked them for every bit of schmaltz" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/17/05].

September 16

True to New Orleans ritual, Higher Ground -- the benefit for Hurricane Katrina relief at the Rose Theater . . . - opened with a processional and wound up with a parade. Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which presented the show, is from New Orleans and has always brought a justifiable hometown pride to his programs. He has also stocked the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with musicians who learned New Orleans style at the source. The five-hour concert mixed affirmation, mourning and glints of anger at the devastation of the cradle of jazz (It was slightly compressed for broadcast on PBS and NPR, and is being repeated on many stations). The concert's most touching moment was a performance by the New Orleans trumpeter Irvin Mayfield. His father, he said, is still among the missing. He played Just a Closer Walk with Thee, the hymn that becomes both dirge and celebration at New Orleans funerals. From a hushed, sustained, almost tearful beginning, it turned more assertive and ornate, with growls and extended slides, determined to rise above sorrow. The actor Laurence Fishburne, a New Orleans resident, was the host. Between songs, he read historical and literary tributes to the city. He also said it had endured 'a plague of light-fingered politicians' and 'generations of malign neglect from Baton Rouge and Washington.' Elvis Costello, who performed with the New Orleans songwriter Allen Toussaint, noted that some conservatives were already warning about the cost of rebuilding the city. 'An effort like this can never be too expensive,' he declared. The program interspersed New Orleans standards - Aaron Neville and Mr. Toussaint sharing Go to the Mardi Gras, Diana Krall singing a relaxed, sultry Basin Street Blues - with other songs transformed by the context. The pianist Herbie Hancock led a trio in his Eye of the Hurricane, a jagged, shifting tune he played with percussive intensity. Female singers reached for somber redemption. Cassandra Wilson, who is from Mississippi, sang a richly reverent Come Sunday, and Abbey Lincoln sang For All We Know in hovering, elegiac slow motion. Stephanie Jordan, the singer in a musical family from New Orleans, made Here's to Life sound wounded but determined. Norah Jones sang Randy Newman's I Think It's Going to Rain Today with melancholy modesty. Renée Fleming sang Amazing Grace with just a hint of operatic inflection. Bette Midler, however, made the odd choice of the cynical Is That All There Is? Mr. Marsalis led small and large groups, sketching a long New Orleans continuum from King Oliver's "Dipper Mouth Blues" to his own swinging big-band piece Back to Basics (with a whinnying plunger-muted solo) to modal jazz with members of his family. The pianist Marcus Roberts played his New Orleans Blues, riffling elegantly through styles from gospel to stride to rumba to modern jazz. Terence Blanchard, a trumpeter and film composer originally from New Orleans, led a composition steeped in melancholy dignity. The saxophonist Joe Lovano played Blackwell's Message, dedicated to a drummer from New Orleans. Paul Simon played his zydeco-based That Was Your Mother backed by the Louisiana accordionist Buckwheat Zydeco, while James Taylor offered his metaphysical Never Die Young. Others chose songs with social concerns. Jon Hendricks sang a bossa nova with a political accusation, Tell Me the Truth, and Mr. Costello reached for the anguish and fervor in Mr. Toussaint's song Freedom for the Stallion. Dianne Reeves poured her voice into the didactic The House I Live In. And the pianist and singer Peter Cincotti introduced a new song, Bring Back New Orleans. To begin and end the concert, Mr. Marsalis chose parade tunes that were modern takes on New Orleans tradition: Ain No, rooted in Mardi Gras chants, and Duke Ellington's Second Line. The finale turned into a handkerchief-waving parade through the aisles and back to the stage for a loose, raucous jam that continued after much of the audience had left - the kind of neighborhood party that's at the heart of New Orleans music. Now it's uncertain whether those neighborhoods will ever return" [Jon Pareles, 9/19/05].

September 21

New York Philharmonic raises $3.1 million during their opening night gala. "Maazel turned to Richard Strauss, and suddenly the Philharmonic returned to the great orchestra it is. . . . Maazel conducted . . . with a welcome vigor, clarity and incandescent colorings. He allowed himself to schmaltz around with the waltzes in the "Rosenkavalier" Suite, and some bursts of brass turned raucous. Still, this, too, was vibrant and stylish Strauss playing. The orchestra sounded like a million dollars. Make that $3.1 million" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/23/05].

September 24

New Juilliard Ensemble. Peter Jay Sharp Theater, New York, NY. "The two youngest composers, Kenji Bunch and John Psathas, both in their 30's, examined the intersection of classical and pop styles. Mr. Psathas's assertive Stream 3 (1996) a homage to Gunther Schuller's 'Third Stream' music, in which jazz and classical modernism mingle, is a concerto grosso of sorts, with a jazz trio as the concertino. Both the trio and the larger ensemble play overtly jazzy music, but when the trio was in the spotlight, it had a more freewheeling, improvisatory quality, while the full band's pages seemed more fully scripted, and more susceptible to formal touches.Mr. Bunch's Arachnophobia (1997) also drew on jazz influences, but was more cartoonish: alongside a gloss on the brass big band style, there was an episode in which Mr. Sachs played a jaw harp and the players in the ensemble rhythmically shouted what sounded like his first name. And in its finale, the score moved from jazz into sharper, more angular hip-hop rhythms. Two more scores reflected Mr. Sachs's fascination with composers from the former Soviet Union. Suren Zakarian's Island of Lamentation (2001) and Valentin Bibik's Symphony for 17 Instruments, Opus 119 (1997) were couched in a hazy language that suggested icy, bleak exteriors but also a surging, inner warmth. The Bibik, in particular, had a vibrant inner life, reflected in a Tchaikovskian pizzicato section at its center. Jack Beeson's Ophelia Sings (2000) held its own stylistic ground here. The way its vocal line veered from angularity to lithe lyricism suited the text (drawn from Hamlet and freely reconfigured), and Sasha Cooke, a mezzo-soprano, gave the work a beautifully nuanced performance. The soloists in Mr. Psathas's work also performed admirably. They were Michael Caterisano, the energetic drummer; Philip Fisher, pianist; and Tomoya Aomori, bassist" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 9/27/05].

Leon Botstein conducts the American Symphony Orchestra in Inventing America. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "Symphony No. 1 by Roger Sessions and the lustrous Symphony No. 2 by Randall Thompson [were played], as well as a fitfully engaging shaggy-dog essay in Americana by Ernest Bloch, the Swiss-born naturalized American with whom Sessions and Thompson studied. Mr. Botstein presented the works, composed between 1926 and 1931, in an effort to define an American style. But they were written too late in the game, and made too tiny a splash, to justify the Ken Burns-like title, Inventing America." In any case, their place in the development of a national style is not their principal attraction. The Sessions First, written in 1927, captures the composer in a virtually forgotten conservative phase of his career. Though he was friendly with Copland, he was more comfortable writing in a rigorous, craggy international style than in a self-consciously American one. But in 1927 Copland and Sessions were heading in opposite directions. Where Copland's works of the time had a modernist prickliness, the long, spacious lines of the Sessions symphony hint at the popular, folk-tinged style Copland would perfect more than a decade later. It anticipates Barber as well: the sumptuous string writing in the Largo edges toward the Barber Adagio, composed in 1936. Unlike Sessions, Thompson found his voice early, and held to it. His Second Symphony (1931) is unabashedly Romantic, with dramatic brass, woodwind and percussion flourishes, richly melodic string writing and an almost unceasing drive. Apart from a few choral works, this composer's music has largely vanished from the repertory, no doubt because it seemed eagerly ingratiating at a time when such geniality was abhorred in new-music circles. But perhaps it's worth a second look. Bloch's America: An Epic Rhapsody (1926) was composed for a Musical America competition, and the composer didn't take any chances: the three-movement work makes its way from Native American themes and British colonialism, through the Civil War, to bursts of jazz and clangorous urbanity. He won. The work includes a treacly hymn as its finale, which Mr. Botstein encouraged the audience to sing, as Bloch apparently intended. The American Symphony played all this gamely and sounded spectacular" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 9/25/05].

September 27

Young Concert Artists presents the Jupiter String Quartet. Zankel Hall, New York, NY. "The audience . . . at the season-opening performance, by the Jupiter String Quartet, seemed younger than Young Concert Artists audiences at the Y tended to be, and the hall looked nearly sold out. But Zankel's rental fees are considerably higher, and corners must be cut: when Susan Wadsworth, the organization's founder and director, spoke from the stage before the performance, she said she was saving $3,000 by not using a microphone. [T]he group gave a vivid performance of Henri Dutilleux's Ainsi la Nuit (1976), a work that, like Britten's Nocturnal and Elliott Carter's Night Fantasies, evokes the fitful magic of the night. Its textures change constantly, from pizzicato figures to sliding lines, from airy timbres to glassy harmonics. The Jupiter players handled these demands comfortably enough to make the music sound more picturesque than difficult, technically or conceptually" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 9/29/05].

September 29

Neeme Jarvi conducts the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. New Brunswick, NJ. "Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances, the composer's last piece and not an easy one, received a warm and solid performance. This wasn't a concert that had you at the edge of your seat, but it was a substantial one that showed evidence of strong leadership: something the orchestra is only too happy to welcome" [Anne Midgette, The New York Times, 10/1/05].

About Me

Mark Alburger (b. 1957, Upper Darby, PA) is an award-winning, eclectic ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He is Music Director of San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and San Francisco Cabaret Opera, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music (P.O. Box 2842 San Anselmo, CA 94960) and New Music, Music Critic for Commuter Times, and Instructor in Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College. His principal teachers were Gerald Levinson, Joan Panetti, and James Freeman at Swarthmore College (B.A.); Jules Langert at Dominican University (M.A.); Christopher Yavelow at Claremont University (Ph.D.); and Terry Riley. Dr. Alburger has composed 222 major works over the past 39 years, including chamber music, concertos, oratorios, operas, song cycles, and symphonies. His complete catalogue is being issued on discs from New Music. Alburger's multiple blogs include: markalburger.blogspot.com,
markalburger2013.blogspot.com,
markalburgerworks.blogspot.com, markalburgerevents.blogspot.com, markalburgermusichistory.blogspot.
com, 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com